We could start seeing more classic series from Square Enix’s back catalog coming to modern consoles. Yosuke Matsuda, Square Enix’s president and CEO, confirms increased interest in re-releasing older titles.
For those who have remained fans of Square Enix for years, this shouldn’t surprise many. During the early to mid-2000s, the company had remade and re-released many of their Final Fantasy games, along with Chrono Trigger, to make them available on the Gameboy Advanced and then the DS. As the technology makes this process far more accessible, Square Enix is likely going to keep this trend rolling.
However, with digital console stores and the advent of Steam on PC, Square Enix has opted to tweak games to work with modern hardware and releases their game in the title’s original state. The latest to see a re-release is the Secret of Mana collection, which hit the Nintendo Switch following Nintendo’s E3 Direct.
Matsuda spoke with GameInformer about his enthusiasm regarding bringing back more from their collections, regardless of whether they would make them money or not.
He also talked about the challenges of re-releasing games, which come on several issues, including ensuring that the source code is still in their possession. This issue has stopped any possibility of a re-release for Final Fantasy 8 for a long time. We may begin to see more re-releases for titles with the game code they still own.
“If it’s a popular series, we want to revive the whole series regardless of what the profitability looks like on individual titles,” Matsuda said. “We’d rather put the entire series out there so it can be played again.”
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